The foundations of successful executive job search!

Simon Gray April 3, 2018

When it comes to executive job search the choice is to follow the crowd and react to opportunities you’re given, or to proactively pursue what you really want whether it’s currently advertised or not.

While the majority obsess over their CV / resume and then position it on executive job boards and in front of professional recruiters, the minority explore opportunities in the ‘hidden market’. The hidden market is the place where high-probability career opportunities always exist before ever being advertised or positioned by executive search firms.

Finding success in the executive job market doesn’t start with your CV / resume. Success begins with the strong foundations of environment and psychology; closely followed by planning:

Psychology – how what you believe, impacts how you think and the consistent action you’re prepared to take.

Planning – defining the executive position you really want and then putting a plan in place to uncover it.

Process – all of the things you would normally expect to hear about when it comes to successful executive job search – CVs / resumes, cover letters, social media strategies, interview technique and offer negotiation, but done differently.

It’s environment and psychology, which are the most important components of any successful executive job search strategy. Together they form the foundations for everything you choose to do, and how you react to things that happen to you or don’t happen to you.

The foundations are key to both surviving and thriving in the executive job market, so let’s look at both in a bit more detail.

The executive job market environment:

Until you understand your environment, it’s difficult to position yourself correctly. Put another way, until you understand the rules of the game and how it’s played, it’s very difficult to win!

Before ever placing an advert on a job board or engaging the services of a recruiter, employers often have conversations closer to home to try and find the person they’re looking for. These conversations are designed to reduce the time and financial outlay of any recruitment process, and to reduce the risk of making the wrong hiring decision.

Conversation one – takes place with their peer group or friends – who do they know that might be right for the business?

Conversation two – with their extended network, including professional advisors – who do they know that they could recommend?

Conversation three – with job boards or executive recruiters – paid services if conversations one and two fail to yield results.

Employers often prefer conversations one and two because referrals here come with an implicit recommendation. We generally avoid making an unqualified recommendation within our networks, as if we did, our network would cease to be our network fairly quickly.

The first two conversations can also yield quicker results and often result in a successful hire at zero cost. This is the hidden market, where a high proportion of executive opportunities are positioned and filled before they’re ever made public. As a candidate looking for a new position, it’s important that you have a strategy to tap into the hidden market.

[The big game changer in recent years has been LinkedIn. Employers now have a database at their fingertips that gives them direct access to the hidden market. Here LinkedIn ‘recommendations’ and ‘contacts in common’ serve as the implicit recommendation. If you’re seriously looking to advance your career, having a LinkedIn profile is absolutely essential. As I said in my first book: ‘If you don’t exist in cyberspace, you don’t exist at all!’]

The psychology of successful executive job search:

If executive job search were a flight, it would be a long-haul one. It takes time to reach your destination and it’s likely you’ll experience turbulence along the way.

The turbulence is the rejection everyone faces on his or her journey to the job offer. It’s an inevitable part of the process of finding and securing a new executive position.

The nature of the executive job market is that it’s highly likely you’ll face more rejection than you will success. Success in the form of an offer comes at the end of a process you can never be 100% certain how long will run. The stepping stones to this offer are the rejection along the way, which either stop you in your tracks or provide the motivation and education to keep going.

What’s more, executive job search is personal. It happens to you as an individual and not to the organisation you work for, which is what makes it so difficult. As human beings negative self-talk, self-sabotage and the need for confirmation are all biases that if left unchecked can hurt you in your pursuit of a new executive position.

Understanding how your mind works and that all action is based on beliefs is key in determining success or failure in the executive job market. Believing in the hidden market and the ability to focus on the process of your executive job search (not just the prize) over an extended period of time are what delivers results.

Summary:

Environment is external to you and concerns itself with how the executive job market really works. Psychology on the other hand is internal and involves an understanding of how you work. They are two sides of the same coin and completely interdependent.

To survive and thrive in the executive job market it’s not your CV / resume, but the foundations that must form the starting point.

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